Name: California Agriculture Publisher: Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources of the
University of California Audience: Academic Format: Magazine/Journal Subject: Agricultural industry Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Division of Agriculture and Natural
Resources of the University of California ISSN:0008-0845

In November 2009, the new director of the USDA's National
Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Roger Beachy posed a challenge
to public and land-grant universities: 'I want USDA science,
extramural and intramural, to focus most of its resources on
accomplishing a few, bold outcomes with great power to improve human
health and protect our environment.' He also added, 'The
scientific knowledge learned from these efforts must be translated into
real solutions for real people.'

Beachy's comments marked a new emphasis on competitive grants
in agricultural research and the first installment in a plan for a
significant increase in funding. Through its Agricultural and Food
Research Initiative (AFRI), NIFA will disburse approximately $262
million in competitive grants for the coming federal fiscal year; that
amount could rise to $384 million in the year to follow. The AFRI
competitive grants program will address five challenges: childhood
obesity, climate change, food safety, global food security and
sustainable bioenergy.

Also last year, in April 2009, UC Vice President Dan Dooley and UC
Regent Fred Ruiz endorsed the 'ANR Strategic Vision 2025.' The
document states that UC ANR must focus and apply its strengths to
people, programs and science-based solutions 'to connect and
deliver resources from the entire University of California, forming
integrated teams to work on complex issues and develop multidisciplinary
solutions.'

These complementary calls for solutions-oriented science, outreach
and education are both disruptive and exciting. In ANR, new groups of
collaborators are creating 5-year plans driven by the first four
strategic initiatives: sustainable food systems, endemic and invasive
pests and diseases, sustainable ecosystems, and healthy families and
communities (http://ucanr.org/sites/anrstaff/StrategicInitiatives).

For California Agriculture journal, these strategic shifts, along
with upheavals in scholarly communication and the breakneck pace of
technology, have spurred creativity, new collaborations and a renewed
sense of the importance of reporting peer-reviewed, policy-relevant
science integrated with the best practical information available.

In the world of scholarly communications, the same pressures are at
work. Today, more than 3,000 disciplinary journals publish under some
form of open-access model. California Agriculture and other land-grant
publications have long been in the vanguard of open-access information,
delivering original, peer-reviewed research to subscribers, virtually
without charge. Increasingly, scientists also post articles in
repositories such as the UC California Digital Library's
eScholarship Repository, and use copyright alternatives to increase
access, such as Creative Commons.

At the same time, journal consolidation and soaring prices for some
scholarly journal subscriptions have intensified the struggle of public
university libraries to maintain viable information resources
(http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/news). Both open-access models
and journal pricing controversies emphasize the importance of the freely
available, peer-reviewed research found at California Agriculture
Online, and the other communication tools that support ANR programs and
make research accessible.

Recently, California Agriculture completely digitized and indexed
the full text of its 64 years of publication. Collaborating with
technology and communications colleagues in ANR Communication Services
and Information Technology, the California Agriculture staff designed a
more powerful and attractive search and display Web site to provide
access to these resources (http://californiaagricutlure.ucanr.org). The
results have been remarkable. Launched in the last quarter of 2009,
California Agriculture Online opened the entire publication database to
researchers, agencies and the public, and also made it visible to
general and scholarly search engines. The information is now easily
discovered, searched and cited. As a result, California Agriculture
Online generated over 13 million page views in 9 months.

This growth is not just evidence of the editorial and production
quality we expect of California Agriculture journal. It is also evidence
of the public's appetite for scientifically sound, accessible
content. Additional efforts to digitize publications such as Hilgardia,
and to enhance electronic publishing of ANR publications, are under
way.

In a 2005 Society and Natural Resources article, Carr and Wilkinson
noted, 'For many years agricultural science assumed that research
was done by scientists, repackaged by extension offices, and launched at
farmers. Nowadays, their roles are converging and the boundaries are
eroding.' We, too, must increasingly create crosswalks between
academic and extension publishing, and increase information
dissemination.

The opportunity to bring these tools to bear on ANR's strategic
vision and initiatives is exciting. The rapid collection and delivery of
the best information available on emerging issues, and new ways to
foster collaborative research and build science literacy, are within
reach. Using these new tools while ANR restructures and adapts to major
budget cuts, faces major funding challenges and competes for resources,
is both sobering and motivating: sobering because critical resources
have diminished due to decreased public support; and motivating because
the opportunity to deploy powerful technologies enables us to support
ANR academics -- and to make a difference here and worldwide.